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Comment by ronancremin | Hacker News Reader

For a web design to be truely responsive and mobile friendly you need to do more than just move pixels about and change the size and layout of DIVs with media queries. A truely mobile-friendly site will serve a more contextually sympathetic experience to a person holding a mobile device, an experience that avails of all the additional contextual hints that you have available to you on mobile: location, heading, device orientation etc.

You can ignore all of this and create something that will render on a small screen, and say your mobile site is "done" but to do so is to miss out on the opportunities that mobile web presents. Doing this right is much harder of course, but there's a reason why almost all of the Alexa top 100 sites serve entirely different HTML to mobile devices, rather than taking a media queries approach.

There's a summary of all the ways to achieve these goals here: http://mobiforge.com/starting/story/mobile-web-content-adapt...

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I couldn't take Responsive that article on mobiforge seriously once I read this "Responsive design does not lend itself well to low-end devices since the same block of HTML is delivered to all devices, large or small. The much vaunted Boston Globe site, a responsive design tour de force, does not work well or at all on popular phones such as the Motorola RAZR or Nokia 6100."

Come on.

Low-end devices are still important in some territories. Part of the reason JavaME is so popular (http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/01/01/if-android-is-so-hot-...) is Opera Mini, but also the Nokia S40 browser.

This is worth a look also: http://www.slideshare.net/yiibu/adaptation-why-responsive-de...

The thing is: the stuff you serve for mobile is the only stuff worth serving. Anything else is noise and filler.

Not really. I might prioritise the 'Find us' page and the staff biographies in the mobile site - bring them front and centre in navigation. By contrast, case studies are unlikely to be so important to the mobile user, but that doesn't mean that someone evaluating a company isn't interested in them.

This is said a lot, and I have to disagree. The content I serve to someone on a large monitor is going to be different than what I serve up to someone on mobile because I understand what the different needs and desires are for the user groups on each device, not because anything else is noise and filler.

Not quite. It's like limiting the dashboard of a smaller car.

For instance, mobile users can do without the "Latest Posts" sidebar on a forum, but the users preferred it on the desktop. You'd probably remove most of the Twitter Bootstrap topbar links from the mobile version because they'd scrunch up and get in the way, but that doesn't mean having the "Quickstart Guide" link convenient on the desktop version.

There's nothing glorious about not taking advantage of larger screen real estate to make your website more usable, convenient, and feature-accessible to your users. It's the difference between good and bad design.

Agreed. Do yourself a favour and consider the mobile platforms as a blank canvas to explore rather than a castrated desktop experience.

(In response to the comment above/below: don't castrate the desktop just to satisfy mobile either! Letting a hundred flowers blossom, or something...)

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